Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud

...I’d recommend Wyatt Mason’s two-­volume Modern Library edition of Rimbaud’s complete writings (works and letters). Any translation requires special focus from a reader. Of the large-scale Rimbaud efforts, the Mason is the most alive. --Richard Hell, I Is Another, The New York Times, October 15, 2008, review of Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, by Edmund White


Recommended reading:
by Rimbaud at Reading Rat


Criticism (articles, essays, reviews):

The life falls neatly into three segments. First came the dull rural childhood with its occasional bids for freedom, then the riotous years of hard drinking and sexual adventuring with the married Verlaine, with whom Rimbaud lived, off and on, in France and England, for most of his masterpiece-writing years. The third and final phase began when Rimbaud—not yet 21—abandoned both Verlaine and verse. --The Economist, Rebel, rebel, October 9, 2008, review of Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, by Edmund White

What did Rimbaud accomplish in poetry? He developed, refined, and pushed to its final forms the basic technique of all verse that has been written since in the idiom of international modernism — the radical disassociation, analysis, and recombination of all the material elements of poetry. This means all, not just the syntactical structure. --Kenneth Rexroth, Rimbaud, Poems, Classics Revisited (1968)

Rimbaud: sophist of insanity, by Eric Ormsby; Upon the publication of Rimbaud: A Biography, by Graham Robb, The New Criterion, June 2001

Rimbaud as Capitalist Adventurer, by Kenneth Rexroth, The Nation , October 12, 1957, at Bureau of Public Secrets